What Is Google Drive?

Apr 25, 2012 12:41

Google has finally unveiled their long rumored Google Drive. Now you've got another option of stashing your data in the cloud.

First lets look at how many other clouds there are out there right now. There's Dropbox, Microsoft's SkyDrive, Apple's iCloud, Evernote, and Box that are all contending for your content. Google Drive might just be the one to stand out.

Google Drive has an app for Windows and OS X that will sync all your documents, videos and other files with the cloud. There's an Android app and a forthcoming iOS app for mobile access too. Each user will get 5GB free and can upgrade to 25GB for $2.49 a month, 100GB for $4.99 a month or even 1TB for $49.99 a month. If you're keeping score, that's cheaper than Dropbox.

Google Drive is a cloud storage service…

Its a beefed version of Google Docs. Store documents, photos, videos, music and more in one place. If you change your device, it will automatically show up if you were to access it elsewhere. The good thing about it as well is that it tracks your changes, so if you make an edit to a document and hit save, you can still look back at all your revisions from the past 30 days.

Google Drive will offer both free and premium options…

You can get up to 5GB of space for free, after which you can upgrade. It's $2.49/month for 25GB, $4.99/month for 100GB, and $49.99 a month for a whopping 1TB. If you move to a premium account it also automatically expands your Gmail storage to 25GB.

…integrate with Gmail and third-party apps…

The service can handle more than 30 different types of files, including Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and HD video, and you don't have to have any of those programs on your computer. Drive also pretty much does away with email attachments, which makes sharing a lot easier. If you wanted to show a friend a video of your vacation, you could just pass them a link to that file, rather than adding it to a clunky message.

…and isn't exclusive to Android...

Though Apple's iCloud only caters to iOS users, the Google counterpart is open to all platforms. It's easily accessible from a wide variety of devices, like Android tablets and phones, as well as the iPad and the iPhone (though only through a web browser at the moment). You can also download Drive for your Mac or PC.

Will Dropbox be able to survive the Google Drive? It's already got 45 million users but Google Drive itself does sound enticing already.

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